PANAVISION Inc. was founded by Robert E. Gottschalk in 1954, shortly after the introduction of the CinemaScope wide screen format, to fulfill the need for high quality anamorphic projection lens attachments.
Within a year of the introduction of the CinemaScope format, ordinary 4 × 3 (1.37:1) pictures quickly looked old fashioned and theatre owners frantically sought a source of good anamorphic lens attachments to enable them to show the new films without the need to modify their theatres or to be beholden to one supplier.
At that time Gottschalk owned a camera store in Westwood Village where he numbered among his customers many professional photographers and cinematographers. Among his acquaintances was an optical engineer who helped him to design a prism type deanamorphoser which proved to be superior to the original CinemaScope projection lenses.
Within a short while he and a small staff, which included Frank Vogelsang, Tak Miyagishima, George Kraemer and Jack Barber, produced and delivered some 35,000 lenses until the market became saturated.
Other founder participants were Harry Eller, who owned the Radiant Screen Company in Chicago, the largest screen manufacturers in the U.S., William Mann, an optical manufacturer, Richard Moore and Meridith Nicholson, both Directors of Photography, and Walter Wallin, an optical designer. All of this group dropped out of the company soon after the initial demand for projection lenses was satisfied.
In 1957, at about the same time that the demand for projection lenses was falling off, Gottschalk was asked by MGM to develop a set of anamorphic lenses with a 1.33:1 squeeze ratio for 65mm cameras for a forthcoming production, Raintree County, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift and in which they were attempting to outdo Gone With the Wind. The system was called CAMERA 65.
Another CAMERA 65 picture of the period was Ben Hur (1959) the first PANAVISION lensed picture to win an Academy Award for Cinematography.
The CAMERA 65 system was later further developed, changed to a 1.25:1 squeeze ratio and called ULTRA PANAVISION.
Building upon this success PANAVISION developed a system of nonanamorphic 65mm cameras and lenses, called SUPER PANAVISION, and such pictures as Exodus, West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia and My Fair Lady all bore this label.
The next step was 35mm 2:1 anamorphic lenses and PANAVISION 35 was born. The lenses were called AUTO PANATARS, a name which has endured to this day.
These lenses incorporated patented counter-rotating focusing elements, developed by Walter Wallin, which eliminated what had become known as ‘anamorphic mumps’, the swelling of faces in close-ups, which upset many famous Hollywood actors and actresses and made them reluctant to appear in CinemaScope films.
Those who were in the screening room at MGM when the first tests of the new lenses were screened recalled that the entire audience clapped and cheered at what they saw. It was the dawning of a new age of anamorphic cinematography and since that time almost every truly major picture shot in the anamorphic format has been photographed using PANAVISION AUTO PANATAR lenses.
In 1958 PANAVISION Inc. received an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement and in 1993 won an Oscar© for the development of these lenses.
Even Twentieth Century Fox, who pioneered the whole process of CinemaScope 2.35:1 anamorphic cinematography, quickly changed to PANAVISION lenses when they saw the improvement in image quality.
Among the early pictures shot using the PANAVISION 35 system and blown-up to 70mm for road show presentation were Beckett, The Cardinal and Doctor Zhivago.
The next logical step was to provide cameras to go with their lenses and PANAVISION rapidly became well known for their innovative modifications to existing Mitchell and Arriflex cameras.
In the early 60’s, with television making inroads to their traditional movie theatre business and with so many of their pictures being photographed with cameras and lenses supplied by PANAVISION, MGM and many other major studios decided to close down their camera departments and most sold off their entire inventory of cameras and lenses to PANAVISION.
This gave the company an abundance of Mitchell BNC 35mm cameras which they rebuilt as the PANAVISION SILENT REFLEX CAMERA, incorporating mirror shutter reflex viewfinding, crystal controlled motors, quietness of operation, lightness of weight and interchangeability of lenses between all cameras within the system, thus rendering all other Mitchell BNCs obsolescent.
The PSR cameras were immensely successful and rapidly became the industry standard.
Robert Gottschalk realized that good though the PSR was, it was not hand-holdable and set about designing and building a hand-holdable silent reflex support camera.
The result was the PANAFLEX motion picture camera.
The rest, as they say, is history.
This book is dedicated to the memories of
Robert E. Gottschalk
1917- 1982,
Frank P. Vogelsang
1934- 1988
and
George Kraemer
1927 - 1993